The alliance will fuse the Tradeweb marketplace with Aladdin to create a powerful combination of order management, pricing, and execution tools providing clients with increased ability to recognize trading opportunities. The strategic alliance will also benefit the broader investment community by bringing enhanced market data and trading tools to Tradeweb clients.

Through this initiative, the Aladdin community will gain access to Tradeweb’s transparent pricing from over 40 liquidity providers through the Aladdin Trading Network, a liquidity portal within Aladdin that leverages connectivity to aggregate external liquidity and integrate the marketplace within Aladdin’s tools.

“Integrating Aladdin with Tradeweb’s global rates and derivatives platform delivers a more streamlined and enhanced trading experience,” said Sudhir Nair, incoming Global Head of the Aladdin Business. “Given regulatory and workflow pressures in the rates and derivatives markets, partnering with Tradeweb to aggregate liquidity and increase efficiencies in trading is a natural extension of the Aladdin Trading Network and delivers immediate value to the Aladdin.

If you want to know how big a deal Aladdin is in the investment-management world (made even bigger after today’s alliance), read this profile of BlackRock and Aladdin that the Economist published in December. Or at least read this excerpt:

[F]or regulators that want not merely to prevent a repeat of the last blow-up but also to identify the sources of future systemic perils, BlackRock raises another, subtler issue, concerning not the ownership of assets but the way buying and selling decisions are made. The $15 trillion of assets managed on its Aladdin platform amount to around 7% of all the shares, bonds and loans in the world. As a result, those who oversee many of the world’s biggest pools of money are looking at the financial world, at least in part, through a lens crafted by BlackRock. Some 17,000 traders in banks, insurance companies, sovereign-wealth funds and others rely in part on BlackRock’s analytical models to guide their investing.

That is a tribute to BlackRock’s elaborate risk-management models, but it is also discomfiting. A principle of healthy markets is that a cacophony of diverse actors come to different conclusions on the price of things, based on their own idiosyncratic analyses. The value of any asset is discovered by melding all these different opinions into a single price. An ecosystem which is dominated by a single line of thinking is not healthy, in politics, in nature or in markets. Such groupthink in finance is a recipe for booms (when everyone wants to buy the same thing) and busts (when they all rush to sell). Though Aladdin advises clients on investment decisions rather than making them, it inevitably frames how they think of market risk.